EatonMediahttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk
SEO, Web stuff, Programming etcSun, 28 Nov 2010 10:53:14 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1Targets achievedhttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2010/11/targets-achieved.html
http://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2010/11/targets-achieved.html#commentsSun, 28 Nov 2010 10:53:14 +0000Chrishttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/?p=142Wow, it has been a LONG time since I last posted. I’m sure the only people left subscribed to my blog are friends and bots. I think blogging is quite a narcissistic endeavour anyway so I guess I am doing this more for me than any audience I may still have. The reason I am writing this is two fold, one I have achieved something I didnt think I would and two, my friends Guy and Darren Steadman have recently started blogging again which tends to spur you on.

SO where have I been and what have I been doing?

Sites bought

I made my first plunge into site investment when I bought a covers website last January. When I bought it the site was doing 300 visits a day, at the moment its doing just shy of 10,000 visits a day. I’m hoping this one keeps on improving and improving. Ironically a few people I know scoffed at my decision to purchase the site as it wasn’t bought for a token amount.

Targets Hit

Thanks to the purchase of the aforementioned site and overall improvements over my entire estate I am pleased to report I am now doing 1 million hits a month over all my sites. Not a bad statistic if you ask me! Question now is, what is the next target to hit? I feel like I am just about hitting all mine meaning I am left feeling a little odd… I never thought I would reach such levels – even though I am fully aware I am still a little fish – but personally I never thought I’d be here.

New pad

I used to live with a fella known as Ell (Hi if your reading) he was awesome (you are reading right?). Anyway he left Northampton to move to Leeds; apparently there is more ass up there! So that left me with a choice, stay in our current place or try find another place. After a bit of luck I found an awesome flat in a converted mental hospital; somewhat fitting isn’t it?

Conslusion

As usual I have ran out of steam when writing this, I think I get bored easily. Perhaps in the future I shall try steer away from structured posts and more towards random incoherent ranting.

To anyone still wondering if they should start in this business, DO IT, its easy, all it requires is effort so if you have that and any sort of grey matter then get started. Just steer clear of scammy ebooks.

]]>Hello everyone. Apologies for not posting in ages! I have been a busy man for the past few weeks.

Firstly I went on holiday for 2 weeks in Turkey to Hisaronu, if you haven’t been I highly recommend it, it’s quite cheap, very hot and a beautiful place! I now have a tan to rival David Dickinson!

Secondly I have been very busy trying to build and launch a new website, details will come soon but I am pretty excited about it. For those of you who know what sites I have I like graphics and teenager based sites. This is based on a similar principle but for a slightly more mature market. It is taking up a lot of time but I am quite proud of what I am making so far.

Just before I went away I was contacted by someone about selling another one of my sites. It is a fairly undeveloped site but with a good name and I originally had big plans for it. Due to a lack of time I never got round to pursuing it and marketing it properly. Anyway someone got in touch about buying it and I am closing the deal today for £700 which is pretty good as the site is only a year old.

This is the second site in as many months that I could have sold. I am beginning to think that buy buying an attractive domain name and putting a simple site up could work well as a flipping opportunity by waiting for buyers as opposed to peddling the sites on digitalpoint or flippa.

Flippa, by the way, is the new website selling service from sitepoint. Their entire marketplace has been moved to this new site. It is quite good but, like most sites like this, is full of spam and rubbish. If you can filter through the rubbish though there are some great websites to buy. I look on there fairly often to see if I can find a bargain as I am still looking for an established site to buy to add to my portfolio.

]]>I just logged into Adsense to see that I was able to update my adsense reporting to my own currency (GBP). I thought at first I might not like it (the figure would be lower than USD) but after a while I just took the plunge… and… ITS ACE!

Seriously it’s very cool, its so much easier to figure out how much you are actually earning when things are in your own currency. I for one thought I earnt more but I didnt. For example today I had earnt about $16 at the time of my switch. It now reports £10 which isn’t too bad, it just seems… a lot… lower.

Still I am happy about it.
A good thing too is that my adsense checker (I need to release this, sorry about the delay) will automatically pick up your own currency and display your earnings in whatever your preference is set to! Win.

One of my sites is a graphics site, serving up graphics to the masses of teens who love that kind of stuff. It works very well and has some clever SEO stuff up its sleeve that I will probably go into on this blog at some point. It earns pretty well too, it earnt well over $2,500 in the past year and that is taking into account an explosion I had last Christmas due to implementing adsense link units so this year it should do even better.

I received an email from someone last week asking if I would like to sell the site. Interested in knowing more I responded asking him to make me an offer. He offered $3,500 blind without even knowing any of the stats. I presume he guessed at my traffic / income levels by how well I ranked in the SERPs for various difficult terms.

So what did I do?

I said no… but why?

Firstly I believe the site will, over the next year, earn the amount offered, but it also has the chance to earn more. Plus I will be earning that amount every year unless something goes wrong.

Secondly the site has some very special SEO properties that I can leverage to help new sites I make. Note I have not done this for my adsense challenge as I thought it would be cheating.

The best thing about it? Exactly 1 year ago someone offered to by the site off me for $400 and I almost said yes! It just goes to show how much difference 1 year can make to a site’s value and income.

Has anyone here sold a site (or had an offer on their site) for a fair bit of cash?

]]>A few of you may have noticed I have not posted for quite some time. There are a few reasons for this. First up I have been uber busy working on my niche site and secondly I was told my old hosting provider was going to shut down, in 2 weeks!! So I had to quickly find alternative hosting.

I proceeded to frantically search the web for a cost efficient and quality server to house all my sites and I finally found one that looked good. I will probably write a full review of them later, but essentially what I was faced with now was the massive task of moving a massive array of sites and the possibility of losing money and rankings if any of them went down.

As this was the first time I had done this I made a few mistakes, but in hind sight they would be pretty easy to correct in the future.

So here is a quick checklist of things you should do before switching hosts, preferably in this order

Copy all the data to the new server
I did this via a cPanel / WHM transfer and my new host kindly took care of it for me

Verify your data
I didn’t do this properly and it lead to problems. Check that not only has each account transfered, but the files are all there, and your databases are all there. Sometimes one but not the other will transfer. Sometimes you may have to manually copy data across.

Change the nameservers of your domains
I was lucky in that I had setup custom nameservers at my old host so all I had to do was register those nameservers at my new hosting and ALL my sites moved over seamlessly – cool huh?! I’d suggest anyone do this NOW before you feel the burn of moving 20+ sites one by one.

Because I didn’t do these steps thoroughly (I said they were easy didn’t I?) I ended up in a world of pain and some of my sites went down for a number of days.

Thankfully though, all my sites are now working and faster than ever!

So it’s good to be back, its a MASSIVE weight off my shoulders, and I hope to make up for lost time very soon!

]]>http://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/06/moving-servers-how-to-do-it-right.html/feed4Exploring the earning power of a niche sitehttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/05/exploring-the-earning-power-of-a-niche-site.html
http://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/05/exploring-the-earning-power-of-a-niche-site.html#commentsFri, 15 May 2009 12:40:00 +0000Chrishttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/?p=125Related posts:

]]>So I have been talking a lot about creating niche sites recently, and how to use them to earn money online. Well I was checking my Adsense stats today and came across something that so beautifully illustrated how choosing the right niche can really help you land on your feet.

The image below is a partial screenshot of my Adsense earnings yesterday (for just two of my sites) . Site 1 gets a lot of hits and clicks, but doesn’t earn that much as it is in a low paying niche, Site 2 is a site that I haven’t promoted much and so only gets 50 hits a day and 3 clicks a day, but earnt $3.50 which is a massive difference to Site 1!

If Site 2 had as much traffic as Site 1 then I would be laughing all the way to the bank, sadly it doesn’t and probably never will. But the point still holds true, choosing a well paying niche is paramount to your earning success!

]]>A few weeks ago I ran a little test to see if using Adsblacklist can actually increase your earnings, and it does work! One or two of you have contacted me saying you are unsure how to actually use this website, so I thought I would create a quick tutorial on how you actually use it.

If you have already signed up and added your domains then you need to generate a list of poor quality sites:

Goto Generate Filter List

Drag and select the domains you display Adsense on to the box on the right

Select MFA (Made for Adsense) and LCPC (Low Cost Per Click)

Click generate!

Now we have a list of sites that notoriously pay low for Adsense clicks we now need to add this to

Goto your Adsense account

Click Adsense Setup then Competetive ad filter

Paste the list generated from AdsBlacklist into this page and then Save

Now over the next day or so the advertised sites will be blocked from showing on your site and hopefully you will see an increase in earnings. Please let me know if anyone uses this and sees an improvement!

]]>http://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/05/tutorial-using-adsblacklist-to-increase-your-adsense-ecpm.html/feed3Review: WordPress app for the iPhonehttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/05/review-wordpress-app-for-the-iphone.html
http://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/2009/05/review-wordpress-app-for-the-iphone.html#commentsWed, 13 May 2009 16:27:01 +0000Chrishttp://blog.eatonmedia.co.uk/?p=112Last year everyone in our office miraculously acquired an iPhone. They are amazing phones and I recommend everyone get one. When I first got mine a friend of mine, Paul, recommended the WordPress app. He creates a new blog every week so it suited him well, but at the time I didn’t blog so saw no need for it.

Fast forward to April this year when I started this blog. Given that I am an iPhone geek I promptly downloaded the WordPress application and set it up. I wasn’t dissappointed.

The app can do an astonishing amount whilst retaining a useful and easy to use interface. It takes seconds to configure it to work with a new blog (remember to enable rpc-xml in your wp settings).

You can do pretty much anything from comment moderation to composing new pages and posts. This post itself was written almost entirely on my iPhone! It also allows you to add categories on the fly making life easier. You can even add photos from either the camera or photo album, albeit at a lower resolution, though I think 640×480 isn’t a bad size for most photos!

There are, however, a couple of issues. Firstly, it doesn’t auto update when you log in. You have to manually hit refresh which thankfully takes just a few seconds to complete. There is also a bug that I encountered, only once, when I first tried to write this post in that it wouldn’t save my post. There is a certain irony to that don’t you think?! Normally when you start writing a post the app automatically saves it to the iPhone but I tend to prefer saving it back to wordpress so I can update the post later on my PC. After writing the post my save button dissappeared from the interface leaving me stranded, I had to come out of the app and lose everything I had done – so save regularily! Finally; you can’t insert links, this doesn’t bother me too much though I could imagine it being a bit tricky if it was enabled though.

Aside from the couple of niggles I mentioned the app is brilliant. I personally think of many things to write about whilst in bed or on the toilet (lol) etc. Is it just me who takes their iPhone to the toilet?? The app let’s you quickly jot down a few ideas that you can expand on later when your at the PC.

I have seen a lot of complaints about be app around the net about it not being able to do some advanced wp stuff such a plugin management etc but I don’t think the app is designed for that kind of functionality. So if you have an iPhone an blog I seriously recommend you try it out and let me know your thoughts.

]]>Hey everyone. First up apologies for the lack of updates recently. I have been mega busy working, so blogging has taken a back seat. A nice saying I once heard was that “the people who make money don’t blog; because they are too busy making money” and I believe that to be mostly true, with a few exceptions of course.

I have my Adsense notifier app almost complete and it’s looking pretty darn good! I’m just adding some final touches to it. It will hopefully be complete within a week.

I now also have my adsense challenge site indexed in google with a good few articles, I will be looking to write some more this weekend.

My most exciting news related to a new SEO technique I have implemented. It’s a very special PHP class the essentially modified your site on the fly to rank your site better. I’ll post results in a few weeks.

]]>So it has been exactly a week since I questioned whether adsense blacklist works or not and I now have the results!

A week ago I posted my eCPM for a particular site as $2.01 for its previous week. As of today the last 7 days (since using adsense blacklist) has increased to $2.29 for that site. For those of you not good with maths that’s about a 15% increase, which is good by anyone’s standards!

What I never did, and should have, was to test it also across all my sites as the competetive ad filter works across all your sites indiscriminantly. I did notice that all my sites did appear to earn a little more too.

So all in all a good test, and a good thing to do, I encourage other peope to test if it works for them and let me know how they get on!

In closing, I think it may well be worth while updating this list quite often (say once a month??) as new MFA sites come up quite often so you want your list to be up to date.